The woke’s words lose all their power

HAVE you noticed how the warriors of political correctness like to reach for the strongest words in the dictionary to describe even the most minor offences against the Gospel According to the Woke?

Take their hysterical reaction to this week’s suggestion by Katharine Birbalsingh, the social mobility commissioner, that girls tend to avoid studying physics at A-level because they don’t fancy the hard maths involved.

On the whole, she told the Commons Science and Technology Committee, they preferred to learn chemistry or biology.

Now, I can quite see that some feminists may find her view annoying — though they might at least give her credit, as the founder and head teacher of a community school, for speaking with some experience of teenage girls.

Listening to Dame Athene Donald, however, you might be forgiven for thinking that the commissioner was a serial killer.

A professor of experimental physics, and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, Dame Athene told The Guardian that Miss Birbalsingh’s comments were nothing less than ‘terrifying’.

Good grief. If this poor woman is frightened out of her wits by the mere suggestion that girls may have different tastes from boys, God knows how she’d react to a spider in her bath.

Or consider the brouhaha over the report that a Tory had accused Labour’s Angela Rayner of crossing and uncrossing her legs, in the style of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

You or I might think the remark either mildly amusing, or somewhat off-colour. But surely nothing worse than that.

Not so a Labour front-bencher, who declared that the unnamed Tory’s claim was ‘horrific’.

Just one question. After using up these words on such trivia, what language will these people have left to describe a nuclear holocaust?